Then he was assigned to work on the latest shameless assault on wilderness, coordinated by the timber lobby and the U.S. Forest Service, that implacable enemy of wilderness in general and forests in particular—a plan to inventory all federal lands and assess what could be opened up to new logging, now that all the land previously opened to logging had been clear-cut. The Forest Service claimed that all future logging would be done according to their new integrated forest management plan, and that this plan was ecologically sound, and that therefore many heretofore unlogged regions could be opened up to the newly enlightened “selective cut” timber industry. The timber lobby went at the Congress, which as always was the best that money could buy, campaign finance reform having once again mutated into campaign finance recomplication; and timber had the relevant subcommittees sewed up, and the chances of stopping them looked poor indeed. But all the big environmental groups opposed the opening of the new land, which amounted in the Forest Service’s first proposal to some hundred million acres scattered all over the United States, and they pooled their resources to fight the plan in the courts.
So he worked sixteen-hour days, now, and eighteen-hour days, engaged in the fight of his life, consumed by it. Nothing else mattered. They had to defeat this proposal.
Then another factor intervened. The President had visited Alaska’s North Slope, and now he was in favor of establishing the wilderness and wildlife refuge that had been proposed so long ago, there on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, which would in effect lock up a large oil and gas reserve. Oil prices were getting higher since the Siberian field’s troubles and the general rapid depletion of all the world’s known supergiant fields, and the President’s proposal was controversial, but in the capital the machinations of the various players ground it into the equation; and all that wildlife out on the open tundra was very photogenic, and very far away; and all the memberships of all the big environmental groups supported the idea of the park enthusiastically. The President’s staff entered into the negotiation process, and they and the Congressional staff and the big environmental groups and the timber lobby and the oil lobby all had their say, and in the end a compromise was worked out: the Arctic slope would become a national park, with a special provision for oil extraction in case of national emergency; and to balance this “concession to wilderness,” ninety percent of the hundred million acres were to be opened up to the new “environmental logging.” And the environmentalist groups all went along.
He had opposed this compromise every step of the way. But the process was a lot bigger than he was. Indeed the Wilderness Defense Club was one of the major supporters of the compromise, having advocated the Arctic slope park for decades. So not only did his superiors in the organization not listen to his protests, he was on the contrary assigned to go back to California and make sure that the local grassroots organizations in Humboldt County and the Sierra foothills did not challenge the new logging plan in the courts, so that the entire compromise package would be able to go ahead as planned without impediments that possibly would derail the whole delicate agreement.
So he went back to California; but as a private citizen, having quit the Wilderness Defense Club in rage and disgust. He had no job, he had no home. He spent most of a year living off his savings and climbing the great granite walls of Yosemite, which was cheap entertainment compared to some. His home was the ledge on the Lost Arrow Wall called the Jefferson Airport. His diseases of civilization got a bit worse. He told all his climbing partners about his experience in Washington D.C., told the story of the Arctic compromise sell-out again and again, bitter and ranting. But each retelling only made him feel angrier.
Then one group of climbers based in Tuolumne took him with them on a long winter ski trip down the length of the Muir Trail, stopping to dig up caches of food and climbing rope, to make winter ascents of the best of the peaks they passed. It was a wild trip, his companions wild men. And one night when they were camped at a low enough altitude to make them comfortable with burning wood for a campfire, they sat around the flames into the depth of the night, telling stories. And he told his D.C. story again, and they laughed at him. You should have known, they told him. Reform will never work. It’s just another form of collaboration.
But you have to do something! he protested.
Of course, they said. But you have to do something that works. And nothing works but direct action.
Direct action?
They looked at him over the firelight, their eyes glittering.
Over the remainder of the trip he learned what they meant. They were part of a group they laughingly called ecotage internationale. It was not a public group with any formal organization of any kind; that was just an invitation to repression. That was the mistake Earth First! had made, they said; publish a newsletter and go public and you only made it easier for the powers that be to sic the FBI on you, like an insane police Rottweiler going for your throat. Or even worse, the private security forces of the timber and mining industries, which were counter-insurgency-type organizations trained by the CIA or by Third World secret services, silent and deadly.
No. It was crucial to stay underground, unknown, unheard of, unorganized, unrecognized. They had no name. They had cryptographers working the internet for them, they had ecotage experts working on methodologies. Anonymity was crucial. They had no management, no lawyers, no war chest, no public relations. They did have members, however; several thousand of them, as far as anyone could tell, grouped in clandestine and nearly independent cells. No infiltration was happening because no one knew to infiltrate them. They were very, very careful about whom they told about the group. Nevertheless it was a growing group, because the condition of the Earth was worsening right before their eyes, and as a result radical environmentalism was attracting more people to it.
And they thought he might be interested.
For the first time in over ten years, a knot in his stomach began to untie a bit. Near the end of his trip, up on the Diamond Mesa south of Forester Pass, they spent one short silvery winter afternoon moving shards of granite into a goldsworthy, as they called it, a new work of environmental art, created to welcome him into the fold of ecotage internationale; essentially a little thigh-high Stonehenge in the Sierras, with a center stone symbolizing his location in the group; his and everyone else’s. They all were at the center of the world, they said; and they danced around the stones in the sunset, howling, drumming on their pots, drinking whisky and throwing rocks at the moon.
The next morning they knocked over the stones and moved on. And the next spring two of that clandestine group drove by his Berkeley apartment one night, and asked him to join them on an expedition. They drove up into the Sierra foothills, where environmental forestry was being extensively practiced. Even environmental forestry needed some logging roads, however, and a new network was being cut into the land north of Highway 80. Private security police were protecting it, as had become standard practice. But it was the dark of the moon, and the road system was at that vulnerable point where it had been surveyed and marked out with plastic flags and spray paint, but not yet cut and dozed.